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For most people, the threat of global warming seems a contemporary one. For Christianson, it is an absorbing historical and scientific process intertwined with two centuries of vilisation and 300 billion years in the life of the planet. He blends the research of a scholar with a novelist’s storytelling skill. His series of elegantly linked stories make fascinating connections between history and science. He finds meaning in the small and the large — from the mutation of a common moth in Manchester, which could have helped prove Charles Darwin’s theories of natural
selection and adaptation, to the deaths of the Anasazi and Viking civilisations, which unveil the close connection between global warming and cooling. Scientists, inventors, and other pioneers are woven into the narrative, for the author finds global warming both a memorable human drama as well as an integral part of our planet’s history. 320pp (1999) ISBN 81 7371 235 2
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